Designing Culture: A Work of the Technological Imagination

Anne Balsamo

abalsamo@annenberg.edu

USC; Keynote Speaker, sponsored by Canadian Institute for Advanced Research


To stimulate a discussion about the many ways in which culture influences
the practices of technology design, I present examples of technologies and
digital applications whose designs were explicitly informed by cultural
theory.  In 1999, a research group at Xerox PARC built an interactive museum
exhibit called XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading.  The resulting
exhibit explored different facets of the nature of reading in a digital
culture.  In describing those moments when cultural theory, values, and
conventions become an explicit part of the design process, I reflect on the
technological imagination at work, and how the exercise of this
imagination, in turn, results in the development of new literacies, modes of
            expression, as well as devices and digital artifacts.